Contrapuntal could you do us all a favor and shut the fuck up?
Which you have not see fit amend. As for the hijack, I stand on the same ground as my interlocutors.
I’ve got a few ideas, actually…but I think these nice people would like their thread back.
On that note…did I mention that the same contractor responsible for screwing up the position of the doors also failed to relocate the exterior dryer vent, which was covered by the newly added room? He didn’t see anything wrong with letting it vent under the house.
My uncle’s a contractor. He used to have a guy who worked for him who insisted on always using his own personal tape measure. The guy never seemed to understand why it was a problem that the first three feet of his tape measure had broken off.
Nitpicking gas stations attendants and professionalism, then later trying to pass it off as a joke comes to mind.
Also whether you can perceive and insult but not be personally insulted.
After you, Alphonse.
Since you now speak for the group it will clean things up a bit.
I will note that the OP said nothing about contractors, and that I did not bring them into the thread.
Can you be more specific? Oh heck, can you be very specific?
Again, I need more. Sorry.
Getting back to the OP, my house was built around 1890, the exact records are lost in the city.
Some of the modifications that were done over the decades are truly bizarre. At some point in the twenties, someone decided that this house needed a front porch, which looks weird on a Victorian row house. Another genius in the eighties decided to add in forced air and remove the radiators, The entire unit went in the kitchen! Which means that my kitchen is a U shape. Additionally, they added a strange diagonal closet in the master bedroom which is kind of useless. This also has the effect of making the master bedroom an octagon. This not being weird enough, the previous owner painted the master bedroom pig’s blood red using a high gloss paint. He tried to fix some things as well, which I have had to re fix. He managed to hang a door so poorly that there were gaps on the bottom and the top. My friend joked that he must have found a door in the shape of a trapezoid.
Another owner decided that a roof access would be bad and drywalled over it. When we exposed it to get to the attic to install insulation, something that the previous owners didn’t want, we found an old Civil war commission, a doctor’s appointment book from 1896, and some family reunion pictures titled the Arions go to Danville NY from around 1898. They were in pretty bad shape but kind of cool nonetheless.
We’ve had an ongoing saga related to our bathroom fan. When we moved into this apartment, there was no ventilation for the bathroom, which was squarely centered in the middle of the apartment. Bathroom smells and steam from showering had nowhere to vent but the living room. After complaining repeatedly to our landlord (duh, it’s a code violation), he agreed to install a fan leading to already-existing ductwork. However, he’s cheap and extremely abrasive, and routinely hires the bottom of the barrel. (Forget licenced. We’re talking bottom of the barrel of unlicenced, often undocumented, workers.)
So, the first guy comes in and installs a factory riser fan in the bathroom. Actually does a decent job of rigging the wiring so that the fan comes on when the light does. However, this is an industrial-strength fan which specifically says (on the packaging) that it should not be installed in moisture-prone areas like bathrooms and it was installed in a bathroom where I can touch all four walls while standing in one place. The net result, in terms of noise level and air flow, was a little like sitting in a jet wash.
After putting up with the airplane taking off in our bathroom for several years, we complained again. The second guy comes in (after missing no less than six appointments) takes one look at the fan, leaves. Repeated phone calls reveals that “that kind of fan is really noisy, there’s nothing broken, so he left”. Multiple attempts to convey that we wanted a DIFFERENT fan, of a type that would not be so noisy, failed to penetrate until we found someone who could speak Latvian to him (and was bigger than he was). My Latvian-speaking ex also explained that we wanted our tile re-grouted (the grout had big holes the water could get through).
So he eventually (after missing three more appointments) comes in with a new fan. He dissappears after ten minutes without saying anything. Or doing the grouting, naturally. We go into the bathroom, the fan is installed. We turn it on, and it’s marginally quieter than the original. It runs for approximately 5 minutes, then clatters to a halt, making a grinding whine that could be used to cut brick 100 feet away. We look up into the vent through the grate and it is quite clear that the (metal) fan blades have come off the shaft and are now resting against the rotating (metal) shaft.
So we call him again, and say that the fan broke right after he installed it. He refuses to believe that such a thing could happen. We hold the phone up to the noise and, in response, he says he’ll be right over. He then misses an additional four appointments, resulting in us having to live with the-screaming-metal-noise-from-hell-whenever-the bathroom-light-turns-on for about five weeks. We learn to take showers in the dark.
After several more episodes like the above, which would make this story even longer, my lover and I bite the bullet and figure we’ll replace the damn fan with something quieter ourselves. Neither of us are handy, so this is a bit of a big deal.
When we took the (second) fan out, we realized a number of things. Firstly, the problem with the fan had been that there was a nut that was supposed to hold the blades on and was clearly diagrammed on the body of the fan itself, but had been ignored. Secondly, in order to get the fan blades to stay on after our complaints, the guy had shoved the blade assembly down the shaft with considerable force, deforming both the assembly and the shaft, and positioning the blades mere millimeters away from the live wire. Thirdly, when he did this, he shoved the blades on backward, so they pushed air into, rather than out of, the bathroom. Fourthly, he had cut off all of the slack from the electrical wire from the first installation, all of the slack which was built into the fan’s internal set-up, and bridged a wire from the internal set-up, through the fan chamber, and to the house wiring - a wire which had been pulled so tight you could pluck it and it would sing. We had to add nearly two feet of wire just to make a comfortable connection for the new fan.
Me and my non-handy boyfriend managed to install and wire the new (quiet, effective) fan quite nicely, thank you very much.
mischievous
Contractor checking in.
Yes, we do leave stuff in walls, crawlspaces. Sign our names and leave notes out of sight. We’ve found really cool stuff, too.
Yes, there are very reputable contractors, yes, there are hacks. And sometimes there is just the house from hell, that you can’t run away from fast enough.
It is amazing what people will do to their houses.
I went through a similar situation, on my last house: that house was built about 1956, and added on to by the second owner. he himself was a builder-but what a lousy job he did! First: he used the cheapest stuff he could find -upstairs bathroom had different style fixtures. He did a slap-dash room above the garage, and put in cheap wall-wall carpeting. in dining room, he covered up water-stained walls with paneling. Plus, the house never had enough circuits-and he ran heating pipes underneath-in an UNINSULATED crawlspace!. Afetr cleaning up much of this guy’s mistakes, we got out-man I HATED that house!
Wow, Mischievous, what an amazing story! Holy cow.
Liberal, I want your house. I demand that you pack it up immediately and ship it to me.
No?
Crap.
Seriously, the place sounds stunning, and I am deep green with envy (when did green become the colour of envy, anyway?).
Except for the fact that you were doing the nitpicking, and I never passed off my belief that gas-jockey is not a profession as a joke, you seem to be spot on. Lute, you really need to get out more. Find a new hobby. I thought some things “weren’t worth arguing about.” Is your life so barren that you fall back into bad habits so easily?
You are lucky Lib. Sometimes, you never know if your house was “renovated” by a professional who really cared about their work, or some retard who could swing a hammer.
We bought an old house that was renovated at some point. The current owners did not know much about the history. Electric, plumbing etc… looked updated, and the INSPECTOR (for those of you who will cry for this) said the same.
But, after living 3 years in the house, we learned that the so-called renovators, whether they were around 5 or 10 years ago, made every modification in the cheapest manner possible.
Regrettably, many “renovators” are quick buck artists who have been sold on making money by renovating houses from watching PBS for about 2 hours on a Sunday. They take the lowest bid for contract work, despite anything about quality. Furthermore, they think “I can do that” like some fucking water buffalo in a China Store stipulating they could pick up that precious heirloom with their hoof.
We have regrettably learned that all of the new duct work was put in improperly (a new furnance died in 9 years), the electric was run improperly (a new 200 amp box is bypassed in some parts by an old fuse box that cannot handle modern implements) and a basement water sealant was conducted by using a wall covering that did nothing to reduce the hydrostatic pressure on the walls.
This, among many.
So, for any of you that are, or know someone, who is “renovating” a house for resale, make sure they do a GOOD job. If not, they shall be cursed by the Gods of the SDMB.
Personally, I love this house. But, my husband, sadly writes numerous checks for fixes and then grumbles the whole time.
Then I won’t tweak your misery by saying anything about having the original hundred-year-old crystal lead glass door knobs in perfect working order. Or the kitchen with its 18-foot ceiling, hand built walnut cabinetry, and bay window overlooking a rose and camellia garden complete with two-waterfall koi pond. And I won’t torture you by describing the front parlor, with its rose-themed chandelier, French provincial phone, Italian provincial chairs, English maple tea-table, country French tea set, piano, Persian rug, linen lace curtains, and tall bridal portraits of our daughters.
We won’t ship it to you, but if you’re ever in the States, we’d love to have you as our guest.
I bought my house in 1994. Shortly thereafter while beefing up the insulation in the attic I found a contractors receipt to a Ronald MacDonald.
I had a crawl space and the floor was well insulated. Too well. The contractor stapled a vapour barrier to the underside of the floor joists. The other problem was the heating furnace and ducts were in the uninsullated crawlspace. This may have helped in negotiating the price of the house.
I fixed that up in a hurry by pulling the vapour barrier and batt insullation and insulated the concrete walls of the crawl space with styrofoam. The batt insullation went into the attic.
whimpers
Actually, I live in Pennsylvania. I just have remnants of Brit spellings from a short stint in an English public school when young.
Well, someone had to derive some enjoyment from that colossal fuckup.
mischievous